


its not easy, but it'll do

by wanderlustlover



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-17
Updated: 2010-11-17
Packaged: 2017-10-13 06:28:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/134025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanderlustlover/pseuds/wanderlustlover
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Living always seems like the easiest thing. Until it's the only thing you have.</p>
            </blockquote>





	its not easy, but it'll do

**Author's Note:**

> **Prompt:** [](http://community.livejournal.com/milliways_bar/profile)[**milliways_bar**](http://community.livejournal.com/milliways_bar/) DE Challenge  
>  **Author:** [](http://wanderlustlover.livejournal.com/profile)[**wanderlustlover**](http://wanderlustlover.livejournal.com/)  
>  **Recipient:** [](http://dynastessa.livejournal.com/profile)[**dynastessa**](http://dynastessa.livejournal.com/)  
>  **Summary:** Peeta pre-MockingJay; _it's not easy, but I'll do it_  
>  **Spoilers:** This takes place in the months between book one and book two.  
>  **Disclaimer:** Peeta Mellark and Katniss Everdean and all things The Hunger Games belong to Suzanne Collins.

When he startles awake in the middle of the night he misses the yeasty smell of his home. It's comforting promise of warmth, of the steadiness of the coming day. The house in Victory Village will never smell of the batter raising over the night for the earliest morning loaves of bread.

Sometimes he startles awake for absolutely nothing at all. He'll reach for weapons that aren't there and find soft pillows, the kind of fabric that could feed a family for a week. Lay there counting his breaths, trying not to dart toward whatever the next sound is. To attack and defend the night, his sanity, from a creaking wall or the wind moving curtains.

Sometimes it's the nightmares that wake him, leaving him paralyzed staring at whatever direction he turned to face in his sleep. Until the panic seeps out of his limbs, his chest, the phantom throbbing of his leg that is no longer wounded. It always twists in his nightmares.

The mind at rest doesn't see the logic that nothing except death should be worse than having murdered, having survived so many deaths. Still every dream twists the worst parts to being even more gruesome, the smallest glimmers of good into the worst acts of depravity.

Sometimes it's dreams. Dreams aren't much better than nightmares. Because she's there in his dreams, as much as his thoughts he can't stop. The Girl on Fire. Katniss. The one who never noticed him, until. In his nightmares, he can wake and know this world isn't better, but while he's not safe, because no one is entirely, he's not in danger right now either.

When he wakes from his dreams, always too good, even the memories of her from the Arena, his mind is flooded with the moment when she revealed it was, they were, all a part of the game. A way to survive. A plan schemed and pressed into precision without his knowledge.

He can't hold it against her -- at the end, at the beginning, he knows, he can't forget: _he is alive because of her_ \-- but it is a wound worse than the one that nearly killed him.

  
There is no solace in knowing she is the dream he's had for longer than he could count, and the only thing that makes him wish for his nightmares. It's not easy, but it'll do. At least he's alive to do it. There are several who aren't and never will.


End file.
